The Center for Humanitarian Technology (CFHT) is proud to announce its partnership with Zendesk, a technology company that connects more than 100,000 brands with hundreds of millions of customers via customer support, sales, and customer service technology. Together, CFHT and Zendesk are leveraging technology to enable humanitarian relief organizations in Ukraine to increase their capacity and impact.
CFHT and Zendesk’s first collaboration is the development and implementation of a customized technology solution for Step with Hope (Крок з надією), a Ukrainian humanitarian organization serving internally displaced people and refugees. CFHT replaced Step with Hope’s manual telephone call center with a Telegram messaging-based operations center powered by Zendesk’s ticketing system.
“CFHT and Zendesk’s partnership and collaborative solutions are making a direct, ongoing impact on Step with Hope’s operations and the displaced people we support,” said Inna Kampen, Director of Step with Hope. “Having technology and operations experts really get to know our organization, our challenges, our needs – and then build a custom solution – has enabled us to help more families in need with greater efficiency and accuracy.”
The custom intake system—designed, deployed, and operated by CFHT leveraging Zendesk technology licenses—streamlines a previously time-consuming, manual process, increasing the humanitarian capacity of Step with Hope. This frees up volunteers to spend more time matching requests to appropriate evacuation centers and work directly with internally displaced people and refugees. In July alone, over 1,200 families received food aid by requesting support through the CFHT platform.
“Working with Zendesk to provide a customized technology solution for Step with Hope has been a deeply meaningful and successful first mission for the Center for Humanitarian Technology,” said Dean Hamilton, Founder and Executive Director of CFHT. “CFHT was founded to provide technology and operations solutions just like this—helping to make humanitarian organizations already on the ground doing incredibly important work even more efficient and impactful.”
Step with Hope operates 20 evacuation centers across Ukraine that provide humanitarian aid, including evacuation support and the distribution of food, hygiene products, and medicine. The organization has received hundreds of new requests a day from families in need of humanitarian aid resulting from the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, a conflict which has created 7 million internally displaced people and 13 million refugees to date. Urgent requests for food and other necessities are now received by Step with Hope using streamlined, scalable technology and processes.
“We’re grateful to the incredible volunteers at CFHT for connecting our products to the organizations operating in Ukraine that can use them to streamline the processes by which they provide essential aid,” said Alana Ramo, Director of Zendesk’s Tech for Good program. “We look forward to partnering with CFHT on future projects designing customized technology solutions for nonprofits operating in Ukraine and around the world.”
CFHT and Zendesk are excited to provide more organizations with formalized processes, supported by enabling technology platforms, and to maximize the impact of volunteer and charitable resources, helping to fulfill CFHT’s mission and Zendesk’s social impact commitment.
